Don't: The Ghosts of Christmas Past
by Neftzer
Summary: COMPLETE. The Don't Series. A Christmas Eve interlude. Set 1989 Hoboken, New Jersey and 1943, the Channel Island of Sark. Gang-centric. (Takes place between Parts One and Two of Story 3: Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours)


**A/N: **This story uses the gap in time between _Part One_ of story 3 "Don't Give Out with Those Lips of Yours" and _Part Two_ (which opens in April 1944). The break between the parts falls after the secret marriage of Robin and Marion by La Salle in late autumn of 1943. During this time period, as you will recall, Mitch is believed by the gang to have been killed (as Gisbonnhoffer claims he has been), though he is really alive and being kept at the Heindl's on Guernsey.

Apologies that I have left Allen where I have in _'Til I Come Marchin' Home_ - around the holidays I apparently really long to write a Hallmark Original Movie.

Allen's drama will re-commence with updates in the new year. Promise.

*If you have been here before, this will look at little different. No new content, but I realized that I had put it down wrong, and that it works better with the 1989 bit bookending the 1943 flashback, so I made the change.

* * *

**Don't: The Ghosts of Christmas Past**

* * *

**1989 – **Zara Armstrong climbed the stairs of 832 King's Court in a two-story redbrick neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey. She was headed to her father's room to check her facts on what had transpired when 10-year-old Alex, her youngest child, had delivered a basket of clean laundry to it just after the family had finished their lunch.

Just down the hallway, past the other bedrooms, she could hear the sound of the shower running full-blast, the pipes with a voice of their own in a house of this age. Knowing the bedroom in question to be empty, its occupant the one busy in the bathroom, she did not bother to knock, but opened the door and let herself in to the sparsely furnished space whose floorplan included a small sitting nook separate from the main area.

A bed, a desk, a chair. Hardwood floors covered only a little by two large rugs, one beneath the bed, the other under the chair and sidetable and standing lamp. Two windows, as it was a corner room.

She inhaled deeply for a moment, trying to recall the scents of the past, when it had been her great-grandmother's room, decorated as oppositely to how it was now as anything could possibly be. Gone were the icons, the ornate lamps and luxurious fabrics Babushka had loved, gone the fresh flowers she had insisted upon. Other than the brass bed (looking almost institutional with its new, slimmer mattresses), all that remained here of Babushka's was her roll-top desk, now possessed by her grandson — himself a grandfather (and soon to be a great one).

Gone were the fragrances. Dim, at best, was the memory of Babushka, once so potent.

But, here was the bowl and plate as had been reported missing by Alex. A plate of what, last night, had been a pair of soft yeast dinner rolls. She picked one up. Hard as hockey pucks now. A bowl of oats, congealing since morning (hopefully _this_ morning). Both were sitting upon the wide, low sill of the east-facing window.

Oddly (if one assumed the fact they were there at all was not in itself odd), neither bowl nor plate was in common use within the house. In fact, both were pieces from Babushka's prized china. Those dishes that she, Zara, often thought about putting to use on a meal for a special day; but with ten-year-olds still loose in the house, she always found herself shying away from.

"I am discovered, then," she heard her father's voice behind her declare.

She gave a small laugh, more breath than chuckle, knowing he meant it as a joke.

"Alex," she said.

"I should have guessed," Thomas Carter replied, walking fully into the center of the room and toward the bed, where his fresh shirt lay. He had already changed into his pants and sleeveless undershirt in the bath, his towel still draped about his neck, fleck of missed shaving cream on the underside of his jaw.

"Well, he _is_ still smarting for the whole spaghetti found between the mattresses of his bed…" she offered, her expression married to a shrug.

"And so he plans to see _me_ punished in like fashion," Carter intuited, nodding.

He slid the towel off from around his neck, and Zara could not help herself (she never could) from noticing the peculiar scarring patterns upon the sections of his arms and chest visible and uncovered by the undershirt.

Because of his age she had lately begun attending his doctor's appointments with him. Not that there were very many, but there were enough at his age, even for a healthy man (which he physically was). It was there she had first seen some of what his life — his war, as she thought of it — had left him with. She didn't ask how he had come by them. He probably would have told her if she had. But she hadn't.

But her notice of them today was a quick one, and his shirt was quickly on, and the reminder of both her father's advancing age – and of his murky past – was again back in its box.

"We were talking —" she began.

"You and -?"

"Ken," she replied, naming her husband. "About the house. About you. About whether you might like it if, when Lucy moves out, and it'll be sooner than we all think, I imagine — If you'd like the wall knocked in between that room and this, maybe have an accessible shower and toilet just for you?"

"I'm fine as I am," he replied, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull on his shoes, showing little age in his limberness at the task. "The smallness of enclosed spaces," he said, apropos (to her) of nothing, "it doesn't bother me like it used to."

"It would give you more space, another window — no need to wait in line for the shower or the head," she used an old military term he liked to invoke for their toilet.

"Alright, then," he agreed to it. "But not until you manage to get that sooty flue-pipe mended on the furnace."

She let a moment of silence stand in her surprise. "You heard that. Us talking about that?"

He gave a measured nod. "When I signed over the house, Zara, I didn't sign over my concerns about the responsibility of maintaining something of this age. Of course I heard."

"Of course," she agreed. Silly of her to think otherwise. Though it might for some, age had not begun to take her father apart. That tightly intense kernel of who he was persisted.

"Don't do it yourselves," Carter counseled on the repair of the flue-pipe. "Have someone in. On me. The worst of the winter is ahead."

She nodded. It relieved her, somewhat, hearing him be so much of himself, that reliable logic and matter-of-factness of delivery.

Hoarding, she had read: early symptom of dementia. Was that what this food on the windowsill was? He took his meals with the family, after all. Plenty to be had, three square a day, and more if he went scavenging for himself, or asked for it to be brought up.

She saw his eyes dart over toward where his coat hung. "I want to go up today," he told her, meaning that he wanted to go flying. "Will you have time?"

She waited before replying to his invitation. She always found the time, anymore. It was never truly a question between them. More of a formality. In the almost ten years since he had lost his official pilot's license due to unreliable eyesight and general age, it was one small thing she could do for him: for _them_. She took him flying. She managed take-off and landing — always in the pilot's seat when anyone could visually confirm what they were up to. But once in the air, once free of the ground, she always stood aside and let him have the wheel.

And he still flew as effortlessly, as smoothly and as instinctively as ever. She herself had little doubt he could yet land and take-off with the best, no matter what the board of review had ruled. In his younger days she had seen him set down in the opening throes of a hurricane, and take off on a night so fogged-in his wheels were less than an inch off the tarmac when the tower shut down the field.

Still himself; so why did he have to go and worry her with this taking china and food and either deliberately keeping it as it spoiled, or forgetting he had taken it? It was days until Christmas, only months until Lucy's wedding and weeks from Angelie's baby. She didn't want to take on any more worry just right now.

She didn't want to have to come to terms with her father losing his reliable, steel-trap sanity. Losing himself.

This man she understood she still did not entirely know.

* * *

**24 December 1943 – SARK - **"Don't feel proper, really, not to have a _bit_ o' snow," opined Wills Reddy from his usual seat at the large trestle table in La Salle's kitchen.

Royston snorted in typically derisive reply, "You're not much dressed for it."

"Still," said Wills, "it _is_ Christmas."

Allen, feeling his oats, joined Roys on this one, adding his own mocking, "You've not much shopped for it."

"'Tis said the shops in Peter Port are decorated," added John, who had overheard such news on his way cross-island from Herm.

"And _what_ is Christmas to a German, I ask you?" Royston railed. "Tannenbaums and _Silent Night_, and they all think they're here on bloody holiday anyway."

Allen didn't care at the moment to discuss Jerry. "What's it like in America, Carter? Christmas?" he asked, both because he was curious, and as a way to turn the conversation.

"Why should it be any different there?" Carter asked, with absolutely no intention of elaborating.

"Because it _should_," Allen protested the answer he had gotten. "Because it _would_ be. Radio City Music Hall, right? New York City — Rockettes' Christmas Spectacular?"

Carter's eyebrows lifted, easy to see now in the lamp light since they had been dyed. "Never heard of it."

"Liar," Allen groused, throwing a distrustful sideways look at the uncooperative flyer.

It was the Gypsy boy who spoke up from his place nearby Wills. "**'_As dry leaves_** _before_ the wild _hurricane fly_, when meet with obstacle, mount to sky'."

His delivery of the familiar line was jarring in its formal diction, but also in its thick accentedness. John, Allen, and Royston all looked confused. Only Carter did not seem to notice anything unusual about the boy's pronouncement.

In the face of the others' reactions, Wills shrugged. "I've been learning him _A Visit From St. Nicholas. _By rote, you know. Get his tongue used to English sounds."

Allen rolled his eyes, as Royston beckoned the boy to have another go at his phonetic practice.

"And you, John," Allen tried to coax the big man into the conversation from where he sat near the kitchen window, taking his turn at the watch, "does one make a special holiday haggis before one paints their face blue?

John spit at the dig aimed at his native Scotland. "Naw. But there is something special in the smell of the peat at Christmastime."

"Peat!" Allen could almost hear the absent, never-to-return Mitch moan, "One shudders to think."

Allen knew he'd be unable not to rant (under his breath), "you shall be beggin' for such fuel soon enough," never having been one to let Mitch natter without opposition, and even now, in Mitch's death not letting himself off easy on that account.

And then Stephen would inquire, being the kind sort, "Very well, Mitch, tell us of Christmas at your Bonchurch."

And Allen could hear it now, just as Mitch would tell it (and _had_ told it often enough from the hospital bed next to his own), "Well, there is duck. And lamb. Mint jelly and roast pig — just as big a one as you've ever imagined…"

For a moment, he let the memory of his friend's (of whom he had been a frequent, enthusiastic antagonist) voice fill his ears, let himself recall the now absent tones he would never again hear.

Stephen, ignorant of Allen's present mindset entered the kitchen and joined in with the others. "_We_ have always found some time to go outdoors and spend time among the stars and sheep," he told them of his and Louise and Dick's Christmases past.

This sparked Wills' imagination. "And do the animals in your barn really gain their voices at midnight?" he asked, probably the only of the unit ready to believe whatever reply he was given.

"I cannot say," confessed the former rector, ruminating on the old folktale. "I have always felt the need to leave them to their privacy at such an hour and upon such an occasion."

Stephen's arrival had distracted John from his post, and so the large medic had not managed to catch Robin traveling down the lane toward the farmhouse, and to a man all were surprised as their commanding officer burst in through the barnyard door. He was late, and as a result of that, had been missed.

"And what were you up to, then?" Royston barked the question from his position nursing a mug of what now passed on the island for tea. "I would ask John," he cracked, "but he's clearly fallen to sleep hours ago."

Johnson grunted his disagreement with great gusto, establishing that he was very much awake — and irritated at being called out. "And who could even go to sleep with your blessed caterwauling, Roys? Who among us?" he sniped, then turned his focus to Robin, at removing mud from his boots, "Where have _you_ been?"

"Shoeing a horse," Robin answered, as though such a task on Christmas Eve were the most natural occupation in which he might find himself engaged.

"Hold up," Royston broke in, suspicion in his crinkled eyes. "Is that one of those things?"

"What things?" Robin asked, his glance to the floor and the mud he was leaving upon it.

"Euphemism?" Carter offered, oddly intuiting the blunt unit member's question.

_Oh, now he wants in the conversation_, Allen grumbled to himself.

"Would that it were, lads," Robin answered. "Would that it were. But no. I was caught out near the harbor by the _ReichKaptain_, Lamburg, one of whose matched geldings had thrown a shoe," he gave a side nod, because he knew the next fact was certain to raise interested eyebrows among present company. "Abby Rufford was also present," he watched his men exchange knowing glances, "and singled me out as an able farrier. I was impressed into the unenviable task of walking said gelding to the nearest tenement and replacing his shoe forthwith. _ReichKaptain_ in tow."

A variety of looks overcame the faces of present company, ranging from worried to angry.

"Jerries with no thought to it being Christmas," Wills complained, disgust in his voice, "or to a man having somewhere else to be, people expecting him."

Robin continued on as if uninterrupted, plunking a generous-sized sack down upon the table around which most of the others sat. "And I am paid a goose for my labor. So you see, _Ebenezer_," he called out Wills with a jolly twinkle in his eye, "my detour is not so grave or demeaning as you have painted it."

Royston and John's eyes grew round with surprise and anticipation, _Goose!_ For though they lived and toiled upon a Sarkese tenement that in any other time would have fed and clothed and supplied them all their needs quite economically, the Germans were sticklers in what they claimed as theirs, and everything the farm produced — down to the last newly-hatched chick — was numbered and monitored. And meant for the German military's table. La Salle himself was allowed to keep back but the smallest amount of livestock and produce, and that only because the Jerries wished their farm laborers able-bodied enough to do the job at hand. Everything on La Salle's farm was property of Jerry.

But in the moment, Stephen was not ruminating on Occupation Code, or upon rightful possession. "Djak!" he sang forth heartily to the Gypsy boy. "The roasting pan! The roasting pan! Who shall pluck it for us?" And preparation began to ready the bird for the cooker. Wills stepped out to try and rummage for fuel to build up the fire. Royston relieved a tiring John at the kitchen window watch. Allen made a move to begin sweeping out the barnyard mud Robin had tracked in, and Stephen worked to supply a now-seated Robin with what was presently passing for a cuppa.

Djak had scrambled for the roasting pan, being still the person in the farmhouse with the best understanding of where all things were kept or hidden (surpassing even Stephen at this location game). And Carter had grabbed the dead bird by the ankles and swung it off the table.

On a peg by the door he grabbed a coat (never enough between them for everyone to have their own, he took the one Oxley had just removed) to ward off any chill, and found a spot out-of-doors to commence de-feathering the unexpected Christmas guest.

* * *

Allen's report that any Jerries not on duty were more or less beyond-pissed at the Dixcart in celebration of the holiday had made the whole of Unit 1192 bolder than they might usually be. This extended to the rare overlooking of Djak being out-of-doors before it was wholly night, though the boy chasing after Carter was in a hood and oversized coat, so that to any but the most scrutinizing glance he might have been anyone.

He and Carter took a seat just outside the barn, upon a large, flat rock that though chill, was the perfect height for such a bench.

"Too bad _you_ won't be eating," Carter said to the boy who had taken his growing familiar place at his side.

Djak cocked her head, trying to get a good look at Carter's face, her hood getting in the way. "What is this you say?" she asked in Russian, the default language through which they communicated.

"It has not gone unnoticed that you've been fasting - though you can ill afford it — for the holy day."

"Fasting?" she pushed the hood back somewhat so that it did not hang so far over her face. "Yes. Not Christmas Day," she assured him, with a shake of her head, then added in broken English, "I eat. In hours I goose".

Carter corrected his use of the future tense, "_Will_ goose." He did not try and explain the foolishness of making the eating of a goose into its own verb. "In _a few_ hours."

Djak harrumphed at his correction even as she distractedly took notice of what the Eagle Squadron Flight Commander was attempting to do in the name of plucking a bird.

"Stop, stop!" she barked, again using her Russian, and was about to slap at his hands. "You stop. Bird is dead, yes? No need to kill it more."

At this display of indignation from the boy, Carter shrugged. He had not claimed to know how to pluck a bird — how hard could it be — grab some feathers and rip 'em off, right? But Djak was clearly distressed at whatever he had done wrong, though he did not know if the boy's concern were over some obscure Rom purity law or something more culinary in nature.

It struck him suddenly that it was late in the day on Christmas Eve, and Djak was not much more than a boy. Christmas was supposed to be a happy time, a jolly time. Particularly for children. Even _he_ could recall that. Even he could find memories of the day that still shone in his memory, undimmed by what may have transpired all around it.

He grabbed for a goose feather already removed and tried, very uncharacteristically, to thrust it behind Djak's ear, his own face not losing its usual intensity.

Djak looked startled by the action.

"There," Carter said. "It is not Thanksgiving, but you make a good Indian."

"Indian?" the boy asked, the feather sticking cock-eyed out of the opening in his hood and causing his nose to prick with a sneeze.

"You know, cowboys — Indians, in the picture show. Shoot 'em up, and 'how'."

"I have not been to any picture show."

"No," Carter agreed. "I suppose not."

"These Indians, are from…India?"

Carter shook his head. "No more than Gypsies - the Rom - are from Egypt. But you would like them." He twirled a second spare feather between his fingers. "They live in tribes, and value bravery and honor."

"And where do they live like this, then?"

"In America. In the West."

"Only in the West? La Salle says in America everyone lives alongside each other. You tell him so."

Carter felt a crease begin to grow between his brows. "A long time ago, in wars, many of them were killed. The government put them on…" he stalled out before he could say 'reservations'.

But the boy was quick, his eyebrows showed he understood. "So, very much like the Rom."

The sound of Djak's hands working on the bird filled the silence that fell, not uncomfortably, nor unusually, between them.

"And the Christmas of _your_ youth, what was it like, then?" Djak finally spoke up to ask, when the bird was nearly plucked clean.

Carter listened to the boy's Russian, which when he first encountered him had been simplistic, underdeveloped. They two had been speaking to one another in it for weeks now, and either his own ears were now hearing it differently, or continual practice (and dependence upon it) had sparked a renewed mastery of it within the boy.

"We light candles," Djak told him, "and put out food nearby the windows for the '_mule_', the spirits of those who have gone before us. To remember them." The boy gave a small grin. "And to keep them happy. There is much talk and work toward reconciliation and forgiveness. Because we are few in number, and living apart from the rest of the world, we cannot survive with disagreements. Like here. We must be reconciled toward each other. Or this group — falls apart. It was said, when Roma stick together neither hunger, poverty, nor evil can destroy them."

Carter listened. Images of the many holidays he had passed in his life began to come to him as well.

"We lit candles, too," he told the boy. "When I was younger than you. For the souls of those who were gone. It would be these Englishmen's January month that we celebrated in. And we fasted as well." _But how the meal to break that fast was grand, indeed. _"Our porridge always had poppy seeds in it. Our old ones said to guarantee happiness and peace." He looked up into the Sarkese sky above them. "And nothing was to happen before the first star of the night appeared, and then there was much, much singing."

"Do you suppose," the boy asked, his tone earnest and intent. He had stopped in his plucking of the bird, "there are any of these poppy seed left in the world?"

"I do not know," Carter replied honestly. As a boy he had always assumed they were not everyday seeds, but something special, some gift of the magical kind. "Even if there are, _we_ shan't be eating any of them."

Djak allowed a small silence to show she agreed, and had given the notion the proper amount of reflection before adding, "But if John has anything to say about it, there will be much, much singing."

At this, Carter felt a trace of one of his rare, rare smiles crack the corner of his mouth. "I will explain to La Salle about the windowsills," he told the boy, "if you wish to share our bounty to placate your _mule_".

"Thank you," she told him, extending the finished bird for him to carry back into the farmhouse. "But you should worry less about my _mule_ and more about your disharmony with this group," she warned. "They chose against our clan, against Anya, and for one of their own. Now, as a part of them, we must reconcile ourselves to the _rom baro_'s choosing. And more importantly we must forgive him."

"So that nothing can destroy us." Carter quoted the boy back to himself.

"Yes," Djak nodded, resisting the urge to look back, around her hood at Carter following her and see if he really was agreeing, or was just showing that he had been paying attention.

* * *

Indoors, Allen, bored with kitchen chores, was quizzing Robin. "What was your Christmases like, then, Ox?"

Royston jumped on Dale's question. "G'won you," he interjected derisively. "Like an Earl's Christmas has anything to do with your own. Gah! You've heard it often enough before —" he did not call out Mitch by name, "food for an army, and sweets everywhere like sand upon the beach. Pretty ladies and proper gifts in proper wrappings to open. Christmas trees as tall as a house, plenty of wood on every fire…"

The former sailor was set to go on indefinitely when Robin broke in (quietly answering) and silenced him. "Christmas was…color" he said, bringing all the men to a halt, so rare it was anymore that he agreed to speak of his privileged past, "and light — parties and —" he drifted off into his own memory.

Lady Georgiana Dalrymple's Christmas Party. Lady Dalrymple had most likely passed on now of advanced age, and of more advanced aristocraticness, but those parties when he had been a child — barely old enough for his parents to take him with them. The Dalrymple's London residence decorated like something in a faery story, gas lamps burning, tapers upon the long and elegant dining table that seated nearly fifty, the light reflecting off the myriad crystal glasses upon the exquisite cloth.

The way in which the party would begin late and go on and on and on…until the lamplighter would come to the street below and douse the lamps as dawn came — and the gas lamps within the house's flames would rise, reenergized in reaction.

So many things. His mother, so charming — never seeming to tire of the company, his father occasionally looking over to her, unable to conceal the happiness just watching her from a distance inspired within him.

The smell of the cigars that hung upon the men, though they had left the smoking room to rejoin the ladies. The smell of flowers that drifted off the ladies. The hiss of the poker going into the rum punch. The swirl of colors and light and texture and the knowledge that Father Christmas was coming, and that if he was cunning, perhaps he might see him.

He stopped himself in his reminiscence and looked about him — looked about La Salle's farmhouse. Took in the smell of the fire being built-up in the cooker, the scent off the familiar bodies that surrounded him in the room. The sound of Stephen working to find and chop what veg could be found for the coming roast goose. This place's own swirl of colors, the light as it came through the thin curtains hung at the windows. The texture of the oilcloth upon the table, the variant crockery that each man had at his place, no two cups matching. And the knowledge that Marion kept Christmas just over the water, in Guernsey — and that if he was cunning, perhaps he might see her.

He looked at Allen, clearly salivating for some further tidbit of how nobles kept Christmas.

"Color and light - and disappointment we never had Sarkese goose on the menu, nor such good company with which to share it," he said.

"God Bless us, every one," Wills announced in reply to the compliment, and Royston sang out a "here, here."

"Aye," agreed John, a shake of his shaggy head. "And on Earth Peace, Good Will toward men."

Someday," Robin replied, his smile introspective.

"Someday," Stephen answered, his words like a hopeful benediction.

At this, the kitchen's barnyard door opened, and Djak walked in, Carter behind him with the denuded bird now by the neck.

"Cook my goose!" she announced with great gusto in her emerging, heavily-accented English, and the company present broke out into raucous, Christmas-fueled laughter.

* * *

**1989 – USA – Hoboken, New Jersey – 832 King's Court - **Carter looked at his daughter. He looked at Zara, grown to the eye, at fifty, middle-aged, but still – to his eyes (from time to time, in moments such as now) in white-blonde pigtails, giant bow (courtesy Babushka) on her head. Perhaps her face was not wholly screwed up in trying to puzzle out some new arithmetic, or the motivations (and weak spot) of the bully down the block, but some germ of that childish expression was still recognizable to him. She was trying to figure something out, and one of the possible solutions clearly distressed her.

Confident in her, he waited, never one to fear silence.

"Carter," she began, and he saw her eyes come to rest on the East window sill.

"Yes!" he followed, relieved to understand. "Alex and the spaghetti. He has told you about my windowsill."

She began immediately to relax: he understood, he knew the dishes were there. It had been intentional, and now he would explain it to her. "He found them this morning when he brought in your laundry. What is it?" she asked, not offering any possibilities, only waiting to hear his unprompted explanation.

"It's nearly Christmas," he said, though of course she knew this. "I was thinking of…spirits. That is all. You may take them down with you if you would like. It is an old Rom custom."

"Roman?"

"No. Rom. Romany."

Her eyes grew suspicious, but not darkly so. "Gypsy?"

"Rasputin used to claim he was half Gypsy," he offered, in an unusual acknowledgement of his distant (by time and by geography) past.

"Babushka never believed him," she added, slowly remembering.

Carter nodded. "It was one of the reasons she lost some of her welcome to the more intimate spaces of the palace."

"Only the best for these spirits you were thinking of?" Zara asked, referencing the fine china upon which they sat, mouldering.

He nodded, good-naturedly, and for a moment thought he would tell her of what now resided in the pages of several copy books in Babushka's old desk, but looking at her again he thought, no, it was something best saved for her to find — to focus on — when he was no longer present to tell the story. Besides, it was yet a work in progress.

Zara leaned over and reached for the bowl and dish. "There's a nice slice of pie leftover," she told him. "If Joe hasn't gotten to it yet," she referenced her son's fifteen-year-old appetite. "If you want to plate that before we leave for the field, I'll run it back up here for you."

He thought about what he had written just before he had gone to the shower, the words to spirits possibly past, possibly yet to pass. He felt something close to harmonious. Further displays of food unneeded.

But he agreed to it anyway. Something for the spirit of his daughter, very present. An act, like flying, they two could share.

And one day, closer with every dawn he awoke, she would read his story, and set a dish out for him. And one for Babushka. And maybe one for a woman – only a girl, really – she would never meet.

"Yes," he said, agreeing to her offer, never one to say more when less would do. He could have said, 'Merry Christmas'. He could have said, 'thanks' for their trip to the field to come. He could have spoken aloud that he loved her. He could have said aloud every feeling, every story and explanation of his history as he was at relating it in the quickly-filling copybooks upon the old desk. He could have. But 'yes' was what he said.

And "Good" was how she answered back.

_…the end…_


End file.
